Exactly a month back, when Meenakshi Jain was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, I was immensely gratified. That is because, at long last, a genuine scholar, academic, and historian had been picked to occupy a slot so designated. Whatever political considerations might have informed such a choice, they are far less significant than the weight of her work and integrity of purpose.

As a disclaimer, albeit fortunate, I readily admit to knowing Dr Jain for over twenty years as a colleague and friend. But I have known her even better through her work, whose singularity and sincerity mark her out from most of her peers. To put it bluntly, she is not an academic racketeer or profiteer. Not that everyone in our field is, but sadly, our system is such that those who are closer to power centres and better at managing people, rather than real academics or intellectuals, tend to flourish. Simply put, they are good at the preferment and patronage game. But Meenakshi Ji is an exception.

It is for this reason that I call her an exemplar rather than an ideologue, a distinction driven home by the late Professor K.J. Shah, formerly the philosophy don at Karnatak University, Dharwad. Professor Shah told me that the Indian intellectual tradition, as indeed our spiritual parampara, was driven by exemplars, not ideologues.

Who or what is an exemplar? It is someone who demonstrates a consistency in their anubhav (experience), vichar (thought), and aachar (conduct). For Shah, Mahatma Gandhi—yes, I dare to continue to call him that—was the true exemplar of our times. Why? Because his life, and as I have argued, his death too, was transparently and amply and consistent with........

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